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To keep oneself clean is an elementary need of a human being, therefore cleansing ceremonies play a role worldwide in profane as well as in religious varieties. Similar procedures and similar formulas are found in Greece and in Mesopotamia. One of the most common exhortation “Begone, Evil! Come in, Well being!” is remarkably attested both in Mesopotamia, as a common inscription on magical figurines, and in Greek apotropaic ritual. In both cultures a mere contact with an unclean person, either male or female, or unclean matter is to be feared, and may be the cause of a sickness. One should not talk to a man who is carrying guilt, nor eat and drink with him, the Akkadian prescription warns; the same warning applies to dealing with a murderer in Greece: only after Orestes’ purification was “contact without damage” possible (Aeschylus, Eumenides 285). Anything left over from the purification must be carefully disposed of: “They threw the lymata into the sea,” the Iliad says (1.314). The Babylonian exorcists may throw away the water with “all the evil”; then other persons should take care not to come into contact with it (Šurpu 8.89-90.; Maqlû 7.81). Also a pot is used in which everything, including previously manufactured magic figurines, can be securely enclosed. Correspondingly, in Greece a pot called a pharmakē would be made available for “those who purify the cities” (Hesychius). In Mesopotamia the remains, including the cinders from the sacrificial fire, are “thrown onto a barren place” (Ebeling 1931: no. 30 c 11), “buried in abandoned wastelands” (ibid. no. 21.38) “deposited in the steppe under a thornbush” (Šurpu 7.64). The Hippocratic text On the Sacred Disease (6.362) reports on the magical healers: “And they hide the remains of the purifications partly in the earth, part they cast into the sea, part they carry away to the mountains where no one can touch them or step on them.” In Mesopotamia, putting one’s foot “in some unclean water,” the residue of some purification ceremony, was thought to be one of the possible causes of illness.
Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Aeschylus, Eumenides 285
Hippocratic Corpus, On the Sacred Disease 6.362
Homer, Iliad 1.314
Maqlû 7.81
Šurpu 7.64
Šurpu 8.89-90
Bibliography
| Burkert 1992, 60-62 | Burkert, Walter. The Orientalizing Revolution. Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Period. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1992. |
Amar Annus
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